Hacker News Reader

Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Do you have or can you add real check and ACH withdrawal security? I want my bank to decline all externally initiated withdrawals unless explicitly authorized. In other words, when I write a check, I want to tell my bank, and if someone tries to cash a check drawn on my account, I want it to be rejected. The same should go for ACH debits.

This might be harder, but it would be even better if unrecognized debits we’re out of hold for a day or two so I could approve or reject them.

View on HN

ACH - a basic account can’t have this protection. We have an idea for an account that is for sending only that is always 0-balanced. That’s not live yet, but perhaps it would satisfy your request.

Check - you can send a check to a specific person from the Mercury dashboard but you can’t print a blank check against the account. That would be rejected. So standard check fraud is not possible.

re: ACH protections, it would be really useful to have the bank manage for me an account # per ACH contact. Then I could set limits on each contact (e.g. this contact is only allowed to deposit, this contact can only withdraw up to $X per week, etc.) I could also enable/disable accounts on a per-contact basis (e.g. this contact is now barred from receiving any money).

Most importantly, if party A leaks my ACH info, this shouldn't help any other party.

FYI this is called Positive Pay (at least for checks, although it looks like some banks offer ACH Positive Pay). We upload a file daily to our bank that says "you can allow these check numbers to go through," and anything else would be rejected.

Right, I know it had a name.

I find it rather surprising that Reg E mostly doesn't protect business accounts. IMO if an account doesn't have Positive Pay or a similar protection, then that account should get the full benefit of Reg E protections. This would probably give the banks a nice incentive to implement Positive Pay for free for all business accounts, since Reg E can be expensive and complicated for the banks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com